Java was badly designed, as a language. The things that made it good came far, far too late in its lifetime. The thing that made it successful was not a good design, but big corporate backing, a free compiler, a batteries-included approach to libraries, good marketing, and good platform support.
But the language itself was bad. No custom copy-by-value objects, static typing without generics or macros to make reusable collections, a GUI library that was widely considered a bad joke, a null hole big enough to drive a truck through, checked exceptions, the frustrating inconsistency between .Equals and ==...
So many bad decisions. Many of these were mitigated over time, but it took a long time to get there. It's hard to say that "designed Java" is really a good feather in the cap.